Dharma in the Studio offers a relational context to explore and practice in the fertile territory shared by the Dharma and the arts. This program is for practitioners of the arts in any discipline who are also practitioners of the Dharma in any tradition and who have a regular meditation practice. The program is intended to support participants in integrating the Dharma into their lives as artists.
Creativity is a complex interplay of self-creation and self-surrender. Together, we will explore the dynamic interactions between a healthy sense of self and a skillful yielding of will and intention to conditions, materials, and desires that call us to participate in the flow of emergent creative expression.
As artists, we draw on our histories, experiences, and imaginations to make artwork; we also soften our perceptions in order to cultivate openness to unknown, often elusive, possibilities. In this program, we look to our art practices, both process and product, as evidence of how we create our selves and how we surrender our selves.
Keeping close to our practices in the studio and in meditation, we will explore how these dynamics play out in our artmaking, our creativity, and our lives. How do we hold and relate to our selves in ways that heighten the possibility of creative expression? Through awareness of self-creation, self-surrender, and the relations between them, we may generate new ways of practicing both artmaking and meditation.
There are 2 two-hour sessions each week. The Wednesday sessions will be recorded. The Sunday sessions consist of facilitated small home groups, which remain the same throughout the program. Participants are asked to attend at least 7 of the 8 sessions. The number of participants will be capped at 40.
Week 1: We examine many dimensions of self in our work as artists, and how they may constrain or free us. We identify ways that processes of self-creation impact our creative work and explore how recognizing and holding these processes lightly affects our creativity.
Week 2: We explore the role of feeling tone/vedanā in forming and perpetuating a sense of self and as a way of loosening it. We bring awareness to the play of vedanā in the studio: its effects on our creative choices, on our responses to our work, on our ability to take the perspective of another, and on our self-narratives and self-surrender.
Week 3: By loosening the sense of self in the ways we have explored, the dialogue between oneself and one’s artwork may shift, yielding more autonomy to the artwork. We explore the effects of looking at one’s own or another’s artwork as a reciprocal relationship. We investigate and play with the flow of attention between oneself and the fruits of creative practice. We learn to allow the artwork to reveal itself on its own terms.
Week 4: We develop guidelines for relating to artwork (our own and others’) that integrate sensitivity to the sense of self, to the relinquishing of self, to vedanā, and to the autonomy of the work. We investigate how using these guidelines affects our responses to our own and others’ work.
